There already exist in the state of the art a certain number of systems of this type which include a plurality of electronic devices and equipment adapted for transmitting discrete messages over a data transmission network generally by means of frames.
Each of the devices is then connected to a network switch or frame switch, the switches being connected to each other by means of data transmission links so as to form a physical topology of a loop data transmission network.
Systems of this kind may for example correspond to various types of standards such as ARINC 664 Ethernet IEEE 802.3 or still others.
These switch based systems also referred to by the English term “switched” (French: “commutés”), are well known in the state of the art and thus provide the ability to ensure the transmission of messages between different devices which is effected by using defined frame formats.
In the state of the art, the management of the message traffic flow over the network is performed at the level of frames.
Such management is carried out in part, based on the transmission related information such as in particular, information as to priority of the elementary logic stream to which the message in question belong, and hence to which the frames associated therewith for their transmission over the network belong.
In the state of the art, such priority information pertains to so called functional priority information, that is to say, for example, related to the nature and importance of the function performed by the corresponding device or equipment and by the relevant message considered.
It is then understood that these systems involve implementation of analytical means for analysing these priority related information and data in order to manage the flow of messages across the network according to the respective levels of priority thereof and for each of the elementary logic streams to which they belong.
However this type of loop physical topology presents a certain number of drawbacks induced by certain uses of this topology in the loop topology networks.
Indeed there appear to be constraints and limitations in the case where the elementary logic streams supported, share common physical parts of the propagation path.
Thus for example, if these elementary logic streams share the same output ports of switches, this would result in the fact that one could face the situation, for instance, of being unable to compute an upper bound on the transmission time (maximum end to end latency) for all of the elementary logic streams having the same so called functional priority.
This leads to the calculation of end to end maximum latency becoming non convergent thereby resulting in the inability to prove the determinism of the network thus making it impossible to use due to it being no longer possible to appropriately satisfy, for example, the criteria for analysis and validation of such systems, in particular in avionics applications.
The objective of the invention is thus to provide a solution for the communication architecture with principles and mechanisms that enable the cancellation of each of the time dependent loops thus facilitating the use of the network because it no longer imposes constraints for routing elementary logic streams (exclusion of routing) and rendering possible the calculation of maximum latency of each of the elementary logic streams, that is to say that, the deterministic nature is demonstrable.